Cooper Union

Even though there was a dusting of snow in Manhattan this morning, spring is truly here, as attested by this week’s round-up of events. For graduating students wrestling with the possibility of a post-May malaise regarding their art world career prospects, Devin Kenny’s free Tuesday lecture at Cooper Union on cultural personas through the ages may or may not help in navigating all this talk about artist personal branding. (Yes, we just wrote that unironically.) On Wednesday, BOMB Magazine launches its spring issue at Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore with readings by issue 135 contributors Álvaro Enrigue and Kate Zambreno. Now 35 years old (!), its artists-talking-to-artist format remains timely and engaging. And Friday’s double openings at Postmasters — AFC SPRNG BRK Man Boobs winner Paul Outlaw with Jen Catron and Zach Gage — promises a boat ride through experience economy overload and Google search autocomplete poetry, respectively.

A rare victory of this sort: Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees and New York’s Attorney General have reached an agreement that will allow the art and architecture school to work towards offering free tuition again after years of fiscal mismanagement. Amazing! [Hyperallergic]

USC still has only one MFA student enrolled for its fall semester. After six months of acrimony between Dean Erica Muhl, and a would-be second year class that dropped out in its entirety, it seems the damage has been done. Perhaps this will be a lesson to other administrations seeking to cut programs and stipends that have been promised: don’t do it. [L.A. Weekly]

MUTANT RATS. These rats strung up outside Baruch Houses in the Lower East Side look enormous (cat sized). We’re hoping this is just because the framing, but there’s a smaller rat for scale. Lower East Side galleries, write in! [Bowery Boogie]

Today’s hate read: 14 Young Power Players Posed to Become the New Art World Aristocracy. Artnet places Maria Baibakova, the 29 year old daughter of Russian oligarch Oleg Baibakov, at number six, and quotes her in artspace, “Through my selections—the very act of choosing an object—I am suggesting that it represents a part of me, and that’s very interesting.” I bought three bananas/objects on the way into work today and now I’ve eaten them. They are a part of me. FASCINATING. [artnet News]

A round-up of the most anticipated openings to check out during Berlin’s abc art fair: Hito Steyerl will have new video works at KOW Berlin and Camille Henrot is showing a new installation featuring e-Bay sourced items at König Galerie. [artnet News

A peek inside the collaborative relationship between Neil Farber and Michael Dumontier, founding members of the Royal Art Lodge. [Canadian Art]

Last week, open e-print archive ArXiv posted “A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style”, revealing the ways in which a convolutional neural networks — basically Google Deep Dream — could be used to process images within an hour in the style of famous artworks. It’s like Photoshop layer styles, but next level: your snap, in both the representation of style and content, gets transformed to the effect of Munch’s “The Scream” or Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”. Imagine what will happen when technologists will run a neural algorithm through sound? [Medium]

Baltimore cops arrest artist and activist Kwame Rose, the hero (and artist, activist) who confronted Geraldo on camera during the Freddie Gray protests. More details TK but he’s on the ground with what looks like a taser on his back. [Deray McKesson] Speaking of Gray, take a look at the info sheet BALT (the Baltimore Action Legal Team) put together about the pre-trial hearings. [BALT, h/t Deanna Haggag]

EMI Production Music is extending an olive branch to DJs everywhere by initiating a six-month amnesty on undeclared samples from its music library. Starting this month, the amnesty is an attempt by EMI to create not only awareness for their catalogues — which includes the vinyl crate diggers favourite KPM — but also send a message to artists that they’re willing to negotiate fairly rather than hit them with a royalty back claim. (Meanwhile, in a galaxy far, far away, Admiral Ackbar is having a strong reaction to this news.) [Billboard]

Art critic and reporter Brian Boucher gets a mention in a New York Post article about Bill de Blasio’s unscripted chat on Twitter yesterday. He is quoted as “twitter user.” [New York Post]

Over at the Lower East Side gallery 247365, artist Brian Belott has opened Dr. Kid President Jr. one of the stranger shows you’ll see this summer—an exhibition comprised of 34 counterfeit paintings of found children’s art. The paintings are hung salon style on the gallery walls and the only clue that they are made by anyone other than a child is their surface. Each is painted with PolyColor on canvas. (PolyColor is a high end version of tempera.)

Oh god no. The website Polyvore lets fashionistas “curate” user-generated shopping boards with different themes. Someone thought it was a good idea to make one inspired by Shabat Gula, the Afghani orphan famously photographed in a refugee camp for the cover of National Geographic. When I think of war orphans living in refugee camps, $95 cardigans, Abercrombie jeans, and sparkly “Dolce Vita” flats don’t generally come to mind. [Polyvore]

Jamshed Bharucha, the Cooper Union’s hugely unpopular president, has announced his resignation. This comes on the heels of five trustees resigning from the art school’s board and years of student protests in response to Bharucha’s policies. [Hyperallergic]

Apparently the buyer of the $141.3 million record-breaking Giacometti sculpture was hedge-fund billionaire Steven A Cohen. [The New York Times]

Emma Sulkowicz—the Columbia University student who carried a mattress to protest the school’s refusal to expel her alleged rapist—has a new, controversial web-based artwork. Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol or “This is Not a Rape” comprises surveillance camera footage of the artist and a male friend engaging in violent (but consensual) sex. [Huffington Post]

Analog special effects legend Rick Baker has closed his studio and auctioned off beloved props and prosthetics from some of the 20th century’s most iconic films. He discusses how CGI killed the industry, leading to the somehow boring explosion-fest blockbusters we now have to sit through all summer. [VICE]

Baynard Woods, musician and journalist, laments the trend of studio spaces and venues in Baltimore’s Station North Arts and Gentrification Entertainment District continually being closed for “code violations” and then redeveloped as office space. [City Paper]

Keith Tillford critiques Dis’s “Style and Customs in the 2020s”, a characteristically tongue-in-cheek set of crowd-sourced predictions for the next, likely horrible decade. It’s next to impossible to disagree or agree with him because both manifestos are so opaque: Dis’s perspective is of course veiled in ambiguity and irony, while slogging through Tillford’s art-speak is a maddening challenge. It took me 3 reads to comprehend this sentence: “Philosophies conditioned by universally oriented political thought and action, or artistic practices interested in their intersections with the topologies of the political can do better than a Beckettian ethics and a militancy of incompletion self-medicating on fidelity to dead signifiers” [e-flux]

An interview with Sean Fennessy, who shoots gorgeous photos of the Australian Gold Coast and Dubai’s built environments and beaches. [Vice]

More Nazi-looted art drama. A California judge has dismissed a claim made by the family of Lilly Cassirer against the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. The museum owns a Pissarro that Cassirer was forced to sell to a Nazi art appraiser. The judge said the case of the painting is an issue for Spanish courts to decide. [The New York Times]

Rent prices tend to vary by borough, neighborhood, or street. It’s fairly unusual, then, to see a wide range of rental rates within one building. But at the Dock Studios building in East Williamsburg, owned by Grand Morgan Realty, there’s tenants just over the moon and those who are ready to get the heck out.

Here are some links about dogs, artists moving out of the city, and why the Brooklyn Museum is updating Wikipedia pages.

If you love dogs, then the 49th Annual Grand American Coon Hunt in South Carolina might be for you. You must also like barking though; dogs compete for the most barks per 30 seconds. [VICE]

In 2009 three sculptures stolen from a Hindu temple in India were confiscated by U.S. special agents in New York. Today officials will hand over these artifacts over to the Indian consulate in New York. [City Room Blog]

Climate change is real, but if there are no scientists to tell us that, perhaps that will make it easier for conservative governments to force through bills that ignore those problems. The Canadian Federal Government has dismissed over 2,000 scientists in five years. [CBC]

The Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan responds to Bill Keller’s piece about Lisa Bonchek Adams, a blogger known for chronicling her 4th stage breast cancer treatment. Keller’s piece remains, but Sullivan concedes that Keller did not take the appropriate amount of time to understand his subject’s work. [The New York Times]

The Brooklyn Heights Association’s library redevelopment questionnaire reminds me of trying to select a healthcare plan on the Obamacare website. You have no idea what you’re looking at or how to apply selection criteria. It turns out the “redevelopment plan” they’re polling us on includes selling the libraries. Your opinion on whether that’s a good idea isn’t asked until 3 pages in (question 9), and the plan is described only as the “redevelopment plan.” SKEEVY. [Brooklyn Heights Blog]

Looks like the worry of artists leaving New York has been on people’s minds for a while. A sobering article from 2010 reports that New York art executives are concerned that art school graduates aren’t even attempting to move to New York at the beginning of their careers. Kate Tepper, a Cooper Union student is moving to Chicago the day her lease expires. “There was a romanticism about being an artist in New York that was handed down in stories, but no artist I know is living that kind of life here,” Ms. Tepper says. “In other cities where space is affordable, artists are now living the kind of life we dreamed about in New York.” [Crain’s]

Alexandra Thom, with the support of the Kress Foundation, spent the bulk of last year making sure that Wikipedia articles on the Brooklyn Museum’s holdings were accurate. Hrag Vartanian reports. [Hyperallergic]